Why I stash baby aspirin above the Surfer Hair' goop

Got out of the shower, toweled off, opened up the medicine cabinet. That’s where I put the bottle of baby aspirin. Makes sense, right? It’s called the medicine cabinet for a reason. But that’s not why I put it there. I put it there – specifically, I put it on top of my Garnier Fructis Surfer Hair Power Putty – so that I’d remember to pop an aspirin every morning before my always-a-failure attempt to make my locks look like some cross between the hair of Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Sean Penn, circa “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

So yes. That’s where I put my baby aspirin bottle.

Why do I have a bottle of baby aspirin?

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“I’m going to put you on 81 milligrams of aspirin a day,” my cardiologist told me.

“Am I catching a buzz off of that?” I asked.

I don’t think he heard me.

So then I followed up with, “why?”

“So that if you go into AFib a clot won’t form and give you a stroke and you’ll die and you’re only 42 with a wife and two small kids and one on the way and you don’t want to have a stroke and die do you?”

OK, fine, so I paraphrased that last bit there, but that was the gist of it: To prevent the possibility – however remote – of a stroke.

See, I have AFib – atrial fibrillation – and apparently, this is leading cause of strokes. Not the AFIb itself, but … oh, hell, I don’t know. All I know is I’m 42, with a wife and two small kids and one on the way and …

I was probably 12, 13 years old and I felt a “BUMBUMBUMBUM” in my chest. I told my dad, who took me to the doctor, who told me to calm down. It passed.

About 20 years or so later, it happened again, so I went to see a cardiologist. Diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse, a benign-enough condition that causes some blood backflow in the heart. It can also cause AFib.

Which it most certainly did about six months ago, when I had a “BUMBUMBUMBUM” event that quickly transmogrified into a “BUMBUM flip filippity flap BAP frum frum BUMBUM wack a wang dang doodle bumdiddyBUMbumBUM.”

So I went to the hospital, was admitted, and it took four different medications to get my heart back in rhythm. Good times.

Similar incident happened the other night, but now I’ve got my pills – flecainide, if you must know, kept in both the aforementioned medicine cabinet and an emergency tablet in my wallet, for the love of Robert Jarvik – and it settled things down.

And that’s how I ended up back at the cardiologist, a month early for my checkup. And that’s when he told me to take a baby aspirin a day.

On the way home, I stopped at the pharmacy, bought the aspirin. Got home, put it on top of the Surfer Hair goop. Forgot about it, until the next morning, when I got out of the shower and there it was: The baby aspirin bottle. Staring at me. Like a squat, white, twisty-cap version of the Grim Reaper himself.

A small dollop of mortality, in short.

Now yes, of course I realize that of all the moments in a man’s life, taking a baby aspirin does not normally qualify as “momentous.” But there I was, standing naked in my bathroom, mirrored face staring back at me, swallowing the first of what I hope will be roughly 20,000 baby aspirin.

And it stung. Yeah, it’s only baby aspirin, I get that, but this is where it starts. We all know where it ends.